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Completing a PhD gives the opportunity to lead research projects but can be a challenging and isolating experience. This article provides first-hand reflections of the emotional elements of PhD study, with a range of tips to help.

With PsyPAG roles lasting two years, many members have been involved in the organisation during its 30 year history. In this special issue, Alumni Officer, Kate Williams, caught up with our alumni to find out their involvement in PsyPAG and their career progression since.

Context: Cardiovascular disease is a very common and serious problem in the western world. Statin drug therapy is used in primary, secondary prevention and familial hypercholesterolemia. However, these are frequently associated with adverse effects, causing poor adherence and thus putting patients at risk for future cardiovascular events. Aim: The objective of this study was to review the statin intolerance in lipid patients and to assess the impact of alternative lipid lowering therapy on lipid parameters and cardiovascular outcome in statin intolerant patients. Methodology: 50 patients attending the out-patient lipid clinic of our hospital with statin intolerance were identified. Clinical data on the study patients were gathered retrospectively relating to statin intolerance and the clinical effectiveness of alternative lipid lowering therapy on lipid parameters and cardiovascular outcome. Results: Rosuvastatin was the most intolerable whereas pravastatin or fluvastatin was the most tolerable statin in our study patients. Myalgia was the commonly reported adverse effect of statin. The low dose statin monotherapy or combination of low dose statin and ezetemibe was the most tolerable alternative lipid lowering therapy in statin intolerant patients. After an average period of 10 months of initiation of alternative lipid lowering therapy; combination of low dose statin plus ezetimibe showed the largest reduction in serum total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels. Conclusions: Pravastatin should be preferred in statin intolerant patients. A combination of low dose statin plus ezetimibe appeared to be the most tolerable and clinically effective therapy in statin intolerant patients.

Introduction Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer in the UK. Incidence rates have quadrupled over the last 30 years and continue to rise, especially among younger people. As routine screening of the general population is not currently recommended in the UK, a focus on secondary prevention through early detection and prompt treatment in individuals at increased risk of melanoma could make an important contribution to improve melanoma outcomes. This paper describes the protocol for a phase II, multisite, randomised controlled trial, in the primary care setting, for patients at increased risk of melanoma. A skin self-monitoring (SSM) smartphone ‘App’ was used to improve symptom appraisal and encourage help seeking in primary care, thereby promoting early presentation with skin changes suspicious of melanoma. Methods and analysis We aim to recruit 200 participants from general practice waiting rooms in the East of England. Eligible patients are those identified at higher melanoma risk (using a real-time risk assessment tool), without a personal history of melanoma, aged 18 to 75 years. Participants will be invited to a primary care nurse consultation, and randomised to the intervention group (standard written advice on skin cancer detection and sun protection, loading of an SSM ‘App’ onto the participant’s smartphone and instructions on use including self-monitoring reminders) or control group (standard written advice alone). The primary outcomes are consultation rates for changes to a pigmented skin lesion, and the patient interval (time from first noticing a skin change to consultation). Secondary outcomes include patient sun protection behaviours, psychosocial outcomes, and measures of trial feasibility and acceptability. Ethics and dissemination NHS ethical approval has been obtained from Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire research ethics committee (REC reference 16/EE/0248). The findings from the MelaTools SSM Trial will be disseminated widely through peer-reviewed publications and scientific conferences. Trial registration number ISCTRN16061621.

Criminology is a core, introductory textbook on the field of crime and criminology. It starts by looking at what crime is and the theories that try to explain it. It then considers society's response to crime. It shows how to carry out independent research and plan first steps in a career. The critical, applied approach is emphasized through some of the many features that are integrated throughout the book. These include conversations with authentic voices from the field, compelling personal insights, and challenges to the reader to question assumptions, apply knowledge, and critically reflect on their personal viewpoints. Topics covered include crime statistics, the media, victimology, youth crime, sociological positivism, crime control, punishment, and rehabilitation. The last part of the text applies theories of criminology to the real world and introduces the reader to what might be involved in a career in criminology research.

This chapter discusses both the theoretical notions and practical applications of justice. It considers some definitions of justice and examines criminal justice models, the philosophical underpinnings of justice as a concept, and the systems of criminal justice. It shows why justice is so important and the fact that justice may be approached form differing standpoints. After providing an overview of preliminary issues regarding justice, the chapter looks at justice issues within criminal justice and justice as a social construct. It then outlines the reasons why it is important to study justice and why justice matters to criminology. It also evaluates the four philosophical approaches to justice that take a broad view of the concept and allow us to see how justice and injustice can impact on society, crime, security, and well-being. Finally, it compares the two main systems of criminal justice: adversarial and inquisitorial.

This chapter deals with youth crime and youth justice: offending behaviour committed by children and young people and their subsequent treatment in the justice system. It considers the argument for a bespoke understanding and response to youth and crime as distinct from offending behaviour committed by adults. The discussion begins by looking at how the concepts of ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ have been theorised and socially constructed over time. The chapter then examines how youth crime and ‘delinquency’ have been explained in individualised, developmental, and agentic terms; how young people may grow into crime, with particular emphasis on the role of culture in deviance; and the link between radicalisation and youth crime. It also describes the dominant formal responses to youth crime before concluding with an overview of progressive, contemporary approaches to delivering youth justice/responding to youth crime, namely, diversion and positive youth justice.

This chapter considers two alternatives to punishment: diversion and restorative justice. It begins by looking at approaches to the delivery of criminal justice which challenge conventional assumptions about crime and punishment. It then traces the origins and development of restorative ideas and practices and goes on to discuss the emergence and impact of diversion as an intervention strategy; the purpose of alternatives to punishment and offence resolution; the structure, organisation, and operation of alternatives to punishment; and the achievements of alternatives to punishment. It also cites examples of the implementation of alternatives to punishment before concluding with an assessment of the limitations of alternatives to punishment.

This chapter examines three factors that can influence the direction of criminal justice: policies, practices, and people. It first considers criminal justice policies, with a particular focus on penal populism and the concept of ‘adversarial-lite’ justice. Moving onto criminal justice practices, the chapter discusses community service and levels of sentencing, along with payback as retribution and the due process model. Finally, it explores the effects of merging principles and policies on the people (the responders and receivers) who work in the criminal justice system. It highlights the role of criminal justice professionals in the delivery of criminal justice and how the 4Ps process (principles, policies, practices, and people) change the game in criminal justice.

This chapter examines crime prevention ideas and practices. It first explains what crime prevention is before discussing crime prevention strategies, the objectives of crime prevention, and the emergence and development of crime prevention. It then describes a framework for policy and practice based on ideas of ‘primary’, ‘secondary’, and ‘tertiary’ prevention. It also considers alternative perspectives on crime prevention; the arguments in favour of taking a preventive approach to criminal justice; the implications of crime prevention for different stakeholders, including potential victims, potential offenders, communities, politicians, and interest groups; the evidence base in support of preventive measures; models of practice in crime prevention; what prevention achieves; and the consequences of crime prevention, namely, crime escalation, adaptation, and displacement. The chapter concludes by highlighting the limitations of crime prevention.

This chapter examines the concept of rehabilitation as an approach to crime and criminality, along with its implications for criminal justice practices. It first explains what rehabilitation is before discussing the different objectives to which rehabilitation aspires. It then considers five main assumptions underlying the principle of rehabilitation as well as alternative models of rehabilitation. It also explores how rehabilitation is organised and administered, focusing on probation; models and practices in the delivery of rehabilitative services, including cognitive behavioural therapy and the ‘Good Lives Model’; and the achievements and outcomes of rehabilitative interventions. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the impact and limitations of rehabilitation.

This chapter explains what crime is and what sorts of activities are criminalised and why. It begins by considering how society decides exactly which activities should be classed as crimes and goes on to discuss crime from an international human rights perspective. It then looks at crime as a social construct and its relation to deviance, the reasons why some actions are criminalised, the harm principle, and how crime differs from social harm. It also examines whether we need the criminal law in order to hold people to account and punish them, or whether a system designed to deal with any harm caused without apportioning blame would be more effective in ensuring safe and content communities.

This chapter focuses on criminology's obsession with the causes of crime, especially in light of problems in defining crime. It first considers the reasons why we search for the causes of crime in criminology, with particular emphasis on positivism, which pursues an epistemology based on gathering data in the social world to form the basis of universal laws of behaviour. It then discusses the definitional issues relating to the concepts of crime, as well as the implications of these issues for producing valid and reliable responses to crime. It also explores the dynamic and socially constructed nature of crime when exploring the search for the causes of crime; the culture of causality in explanatory theory; and the use of scientific experiments and survey research to explore the causes of crime. Finally, it looks at the rebirth of experimental criminology in the twenty-first century as well as chaos theory.

This chapter examines theories that integrate the main concepts and arguments from existing theories and challenge their position as the hegemonic theoretical explanations of crime. It begins by placing integrated theories of crime in the context of the historical development of criminological theories. It then considers integrated positivist theories of crime in explanatory and practical terms, focusing on socio-biological theories and social control theories. It also discusses evolving integrated explanations of crime as well as integrated risk factor theories, including artefactual risk factor theories. Finally, it looks at the Edinburgh integrated pathways theory, which provides an holistic explanation of youth crime, along with constructivist pathways risk factor theories and enhanced pathways risk factor theories as explanations of crime.

This chapter examines a range of perspectives which question the assumptions underlying the concept of ‘punishment’. It first explains what is meant by the idea of critical perspectives on punishment before discussing a number of critical perspectives on the justice system including abolitionism, social control theories, community justice, and transformative justice. It then explores unjust punishment and problems for criminal justice of discrimination and inequality, focusing on the disparities in treatment between white, BME, and other sectors of the population in the criminal justice system. It also considers how ‘crimes of the privileged’ and state crimes can remain unseen or unpunished and concludes with an evaluation of the limitations of critical analyses of crime and punishment.

This chapter describes the skills required to become an effective, engaged, and employable — or E3 — student of criminology in the university, higher education context. More specifically, it introduces a series of learning tips, tricks, and tools that are intended to make the E3 student a successful, capable, and committed individual who is attractive to employers. The chapter presents the criminology student's route to effectiveness, engagement, and employability as a reflective journey that he/she can embark upon in an informed, active, and critical way. Central to this journey is the identification and utilisation of the ‘travel partners’ located at the university and in the student's department, subject area, programme of study, and classroom. This chapter also considers a range of services, facilities, and people that can help students, including international students and those with disability, to meet their health, well-being, domestic, social, and academic needs.

This chapter guides the criminology student on how to undertake research and embark on knowledge production, with particular emphasis on the work required for doing a dissertation. It provides an array of practical and creative tips for developing the student's role as a knowledge producer and becoming a person who contributes to what is — and what is not — known about crime and the criminal justice system. The objective is to enhance the student's undergraduate studies by encouraging him/her to think and act as an independent researcher. The chapter explains why research is important and highlights the breadth of opportunities offered by being an undergraduate researcher in criminology. It considers effective ways of choosing one's research topic, the core features of a dissertation or research project, ethical standards for researchers in criminology, and unconventional methods of dissemination for research.

This chapter examines crime control strategies, policing, and community safety. It first explains what constitutes ‘crime control’ before discussing the distinction between crime control and due process models. It then considers the different methods of delivering ‘crime control’, including deterrence, target hardening, offender surveillance, and incapacitation and associated intervention programmes. It also analyses the role played by the police in crime control; the effectiveness of different crime control methods, such as situational crime prevention and zero tolerance initiatives; and issues surrounding the use of technology in crime control. Finally, it evaluates the consequences of crime control as well as the practical limitations and moral challenges of crime control.

This chapter examines media representations of crime and criminals. It first considers the public's fascination with crime before turning to two main methods traditionally used by criminologists to record the reporting of crime: content analysis and discourse analysis. It then assesses the capacity of media to distort and shape public perceptions of crime, criminality, and the criminal justice system. It also explores the importance of media in forming new narratives such as citizen journalism; how young people and migrants are portrayed in the media; the depiction of crime in novels, television, and film; media classification and censorship; and the fear and panic caused by new technology and new media such as video games. The chapter concludes by describing different kinds of cybercrime such as hacking and identity theft, along with young people's use of the Internet.

This chapter examines the source and changing nature of the fundamental principles of criminal justice. It begins by considering a process of change for criminal justice featuring four factors labelled as ‘game changers’ — principles, policies, practices, and people — with a particular focus on principles. It then discusses the importance of the rule of law doctrine and some of its key features, including parliamentary sovereignty, separation of powers, an independent judiciary, due process, and human rights. It also explores the essential features of an adversarial justice system and the restorative justice principle and concludes with an assessment of the roles of the police, the courts, and the Crown Prosecution Service in the criminal justice system.

This chapter examines the contribution of biology and psychology to our understanding of crime and its causes from the perspective of individual positivism — those aspects of positivist criminological explanations that look for diffrences between criminal and non-criminal populations. It traces the development of biological and psychological positivist thinking from its roots in the nineteenth century through to more modern approaches in the twenty-first century where these biological and psychological traits are merely seen as one factor which may increase the likelihood of criminality rather than causing it. The chapter identifies the main biological and psychological theories relating to criminology and discusses the arguments of positivists regarding punishment and rehabilitation as a means to deal with offenders or criminals. It concludes with an analysis of learning theories that see most criminality as a product of learned behaviour.

This chapter examines left and right realism, which address real problems faced by society and suggest solutions. It first considers the political context surrounding the emergence of realist criminologies before discussing three common themes which unite right realism: a focus on ‘street crime’; anti-intellectualism; and a focus on punishing criminals. It then outlines the policy implications of right realist theorising, paying attention to the work of James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray's arguments about criminality. It also explores the ideas of individualism, consumerism and relative deprivation as they relate to criminal behaviour and concludes with an assessment of the key ideas of left realism, including social inclusion and exclusion, as well as its policy implications.

This chapter focuses on reflective learning and how it should be used by the criminology student to make the most of his/her degree. It guides the students on how to: engage with a reflective learning approach for enhancing their higher education; identify methods for independent learning in the different levels of higher education; apply reflective learning to their employability; and consider how their personal learning journey could help future directions of study for the discipline of criminology. The chapter encourages the students to do something with their newly acquired criminological knowledge and understanding. It also suggests how the core elements of reflective learning practice can be applied to the student's independent learning and official identity as an undergraduate.

This chapter examines whether crime can be explained from a sociological perspective. Many sociological theories are positivist and argue that the behaviour of each individual is, to an extent, predetermined. This means that offenders are at least partially (often almost wholly) directed by forces outside the control of the individual. What sociological theorists generally suggest is that particular social or societal changes or factors may influence criminal behaviour. This chapter first describes three distinct types of sociological theories: social intervention or social process theories, social structural theories, and social conflict theories. It then considers key concepts in sociology, including socialisation, and the contribution of the Chicago school to the study of criminology, with particular emphasis on its social disorganisation theory. It also looks at the basic concepts of anomie, strain, subculture, and social learning in relation to crime and/or delinquency.

This chapter examines punishment as a means of dealing with crime and its implications for justice. It first introduces the key arguments advanced in support of the idea of punishment in general and specific punitive practices in particular. It then considers the historical development of punishment and its changing role in society, along with specific forms of penal sanction such as death penalty, imprisonment, and community based alternatives to the deprivation of liberty. The chapter goes on to discuss the role of the judiciary in administering punishments as well as the consequences of imposing punitive measures. Finally, it evaluates the potential limitations of the use of punishment, including miscarriages of justice and its apparent failure to affect the likelihood of reoffending.

This chapter examines a range of criminological perspectives which are collectively known as critical criminology, with particular emphasis on labelling perspectives, Marxist inspired critical theories, and feminist perspectives. It begins with an overview of the four main ideas of positivism (in either its biological, psychological, or sociological forms): determinism, scientism, consensus, and treatment/rehabilitation. It then considers the philosophical and political arguments that underpin critical criminologies, along with the different foundational strands within critical criminology. It also discusses the importance of the ideas of social construction, power and power relations to critical criminology, as well as the problems of ‘deviance’ and its interpretation and control. Finally, it explores the development of critical criminology in Britain, the rise of the ‘new’ criminology, Taylor et al's (1973) notion of a ‘fully social theory’ of crime and deviance, and the issue of violence in relation to gender.

This chapter examines the means by which different forms of knowledge are created in criminology and what it means to know about crime, with particular emphasis on the empirical research methods used by criminologists. It also discusses the complex interplay between subjectivity, supposition, and study in producing knowledge in criminology; the benefits and limitations of different research study methods on the creation of criminological knowledge; criminological theory as knowledge; and various research methods in criminology such as experiments, surveys, bservations, and secondary analysis. Finally, it considers how subjectivity, supposition, and study interact with, and impact on, understanding and knowledge production in criminology.

This chapter examines four main strands of critical criminology: zemiology, the study of social harm; cultural criminology, which re-focusses the critical criminological imagination on the emotional and carnivalesque aspects of crime and control; green criminology, which deals with environmental crime as a growing crime problem committed by powerful groups; and convict criminology, which is concerned with how knowledge is produced and how the marginalised voices of prisoners are silenced and muted in both criminological and policy debates. The chapter also considers some basic economic concepts and ideas and how these fit into the world of critical green criminology when studying crimes of the (economically) powerful, and how and why the features of subcultures and emotions are important to cultural criminologists. It concludes by evaluating the claim made by convict criminologists that the prisoner voice should be a central one when considering prison reform and penal change.

This chapter explores the importance of free will and rational choice in the criminal justice system. It first explains the purpose of theory and how to interpret, test, and critically consider ideas in the context of criminological study before discussing classical theories which assert that people freely and rationally choose to offend and therefore can — and should — be punished or have their choices prevented (by, for example, reducing offending opportunities). It then considers the main theoretical schools in criminology including classicism, positivism, interpretivism, and critical criminology. It also looks at classical criminology and the key thinkers that shaped it, including John Locke and Jeremy Bentham, as well as the policies to which it gave rise. The chapter concludes with an analysis of neo-classical criminology, rational choice theory, routine activity theory, and situational crime prevention.

This chapter focuses on criminology as an academic subject, what it looks like and how the student will be expected to study it. The discussion is underpinned by what is called the ‘triad of criminology’, a basic framework for understanding how criminology fits together through the study of definitions of crime, explanations of criminal behaviour, and responses to crime and criminal behaviour. The chapter also considers the interrelationships between criminology and selected other social sciences such as sociology and psychology; categories and theories of crime; and people, organisations, and systems involved in criminal justice. The goal is to prepare the student for his/her journey through criminology — its objectives, structure, content, study methods, and uses. It also explores the type of criminology that the student will consume, critique, and create throughout his/her engagement with this text.

This chapter helps the criminology student think about what comes next by guiding him/her through some of the career options he/she is likely to have after completing his/her degree. It also provides a strategy for achieving the skills and attributes employers expect to see in contemporary undergraduates. The chapter first considers employers' perceptions of graduate employability skills before explaining how students can produce their graduate employability and refine it through a strategy of reflection, assessment, reaction, and evaluation (RARE). It then offers suggestions on how the students can journey into potential careers' opportunities with ‘criminal justice game changers’ by engaging with career development learning and experiences from people in these careers. It also describes an alternative approach that the student can take into account for different careers that require the attributes for self-employability.